Slashdot Mirror
No Charges In UK For Gary McKinnon
clickclickdrone sends this news from the BBC:
"Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who is wanted in the U.S., will not face charges in the U.K., the Crown Prosecution Service has said. Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC said the chances of a successful conviction were 'not high.' He announced the decision some three months after Home Secretary Theresa May stopped the extradition. Mr. McKinnon, 46, admits accessing U.S. government computers but says he was looking for evidence of UFOs. The U.S. authorities tried to extradite him to face charges of causing $800,000 (£487,000) to military computer systems and he would have faced up to 60 years in prison if convicted."
Damages they are claiming though come from having to fix the vulnerabilites that let him in in the first place. That and the money spent on the legal bills for embarassing them.
Right, so the real people responsible will be charged now? The ones who left seriously insecure military computers connected to the internet?
Surely if you discovered computers important to national security were unprotected, were using default passwords allowing easy access, or hadn't been appropriately patched and maintained, you would have to treat these machines as potentially compromised whether or not you know someone had accessed them.
As a result, all the costs you mention, other than the legal ones, would necessarily have to be incurred anyway.
They wouldn't have had to fix all of that without his interference.
Please NEVER EVER get a job in security.
Ever
Ever
Ever.
Once such important systems had even been found potentially compromised, they become entirely untrustworthy and cannot be used.
They noticed McKinnon by sheer blind luck.
If it had been a competent agent of Mossad or something they would never have noticed. Or by someone as competent as the guys that made Flame.
But the fact that they were wildly insecure meant that they would have had to shut down the entire system basically instantly and repair it.
They were bloody lucky it was McKinnon and not someone else.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The UK prosecutor can't be bothered to charge him, because the damage wasn't done in the UK (so there isn't really any public interest in prosecuting) and the US didn't want to hand over all the (sensitive) evidence (of the details of all their military computer networks) to the UK authorities (for them to be made available in open court).
The CPS not bringing a case doesn't mean they think he's innocent, just that they don't think it's worth the trouble to try to prosecute him.
Yes they would IF they were doing their jobs. As soon as it was found that someone from the outside could (even in theory) gain access to those machines, they were untrustworthy and needed to be wiped completely and re-installed. For all we know, actual enemies had been playing in those systems for quite a while and would still be there if not for McKinnon bumbling in and making noise.